LOUIS THEROUX: HEROIN TOWN ★★½
(MA) 100 minutes
The blurring of lines between film and TV continues, and Louis Theroux: Heroin Town, which is getting a limited run in Australian cinemas, is really just another episode of the TV show which Theroux has presented under various banners over the years.
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Trailer: Heroin Town
Examining the US addiction crisis, Louis Theroux sees life through the eyes of the community of Huntington, West Virginia.
A specialist in America's fringe subcultures, Theroux puts himself forward as a "normal" foil to his weirdo subjects, working under the assumption (memorably satirised by Robert Altman in Nashville) that the mantra "I'm from the BBC" answers all questions and opens all doors.
At the same time, Theroux has always been willing to make himself part of the show, getting himself into uncomfortable situations for our amusement. He looks and acts – there is no polite way to say this – like a voyeur from central casting: an uptight geek obsessed with the seamy side of life, who uses his professional status as an excuse to stare hard and ask bluntly intrusive questions.
![Louis Theroux (left) meets Nate Walsh, a heroin user who lives in a tent on an Ohio riverbank, in Louis Theroux: Heroin Town.](http://web.archive.org./web/20180204012358im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/z/l/l/f/8/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gzlk32.png/1510808995853.jpg)
For its Australian release, Heroin Town has been fitted out with a specially-made prologue running more than half an hour, in which Theroux answers questions about what he does and why. While this offers no deep insights into what makes him tick, it confirms that he sees himself essentially as an entertainer, with no agenda beyond demonstrating that porn stars, Nazis, Scientologists and so forth are people too.
Part of a series of specials on American crime, Heroin Town itself brings Theroux to Huntington, West Virginia, a rundown industrial community where opiate abuse is rife (one of every 10 babies, we learn, is born with an addiction). Theroux offers some broad-brush explanations for why this is so, in particular the over-prescription of legal painkillers, leading sufferers to medicate themselves in other ways once the supply dried up.
But the argument here has a degree of incoherence: while Theroux maintains that addiction can happen to anyone, clearly not every town in the US has a problem on the scale of Huntington. At the same time, the film's perspective is unavoidably skewed by the fact that "functional" addicts are far less likely to open themselves up to Theroux's camera.
The bulk of Heroin Town consists of close-up portraits of the down-and-out – describing their daily routines, regretting or defending their life choices, and occasionally shooting up before our eyes. Theroux responds with a mix of presumably genuine unease and barely concealed delight at the solid gold material he's getting; the strongest scenes are both harrowing and beautiful in a melancholy way, particularly when he visits a group of addicts living in tents down by the river.
Putting Heroin Town on the big screen brings home that Theroux is unequivocally an exploitation filmmaker, in the double sense of exploiting lurid subject matter and specific, vulnerable people. In an especially disturbing scene, an interview subject asks her partner to step out of the room so she can confide that he has physically abused her. What will the consequences be once this revelation is aired to a global audience? By that time, presumably, Theroux will have moved on.